How Many Drives Need

[j king]

Hi,
I have an event coming up that I would like to capture via my HDBX 1000 box.
In the past when I have used this box and captured from Sony EX-3 (mostly talent reels), I have only captured in clips of about 9 to 15 min. Now I would like to capture a 3 hour event but I don't know if my two drive raid 0 could handle that long of an event. My capture drives are two western digital 10,000 rpm each at 500 GB. I would like to capture in canopus HQ fine which I believe is somewhere around 300Mbps but no less the a 50 Mbps rate. I an looking for help to see if either a 2 or 4 drive raid 0 could perform that long of a capture.
I also have the very same raid 0 setup for my system drive also, so if needed I could drop system raid 0 and then allow me to get a 4 500 GB 10,000 rpm raid 0 capture drive but then I would have to go to a one drive system drive.

Thank You
Jeff

[Adbear]

Just so you know, 300Mb/s equates to around 37.5MB/s which even the slowest single modern drive can keep up with, and 3 hours should fit easily onto 1 of those 500GB drives. Personally I stay away from stripe sets, as they are prone to failure, and you lose 1 drive you lose the lot

Just so you know for future on how to work out the figures

1MB/s = 8Mb/s
1GB=1024MB
so
300Mb/s /8 = 37.5 MB/s
1 minute = 37.5*60 = 2250MB
1 hour = 2250*60 = 135000MB
3 hours = 3*135000 = 405000MB

which you then divide by 1024 to work out how much space on your drive you need
405000/1024 = 395.51GB (rounded up)

Hope this helps

[j king]

Thanks

Hi Adbear,
Thank you for you breakdown, I currently capture very small clips to my raid 0 drive and have been for several years now and I always use canopus HQ Fine or close to that which is about 345 Mbps but again as I said in my 1st post they only range from several min to as much as 17-25 min and have never had a problem with my files yet (knock on wood), but I do replace my drives about once a year as they do see a lot of work (about 17 to 22 hours of recording a week). My concern is I have never pushed my system to record 3 + hours without a stop in the record and this event has one of my grandkids in it so I want to record at a good bit rate.
I though Edius stressed the use of raid 0 for capturing HD video in their setup of equipment. That was the only reason I did not run a raid 1 instead.
I do have the SXS cards as a backup but I am using my EX-3 which only gives 35Mbps max.
I don't understand why it took so long for my post to show up in this forum, I checked every hour for five hours and did not see the post, had to leave so I could not replay until know.

Jeff